WWI Centennial: Austria-Hungary’s Last Gasp

Erik Sass is covering the events of the war exactly 100 years after they happened. This is the 310th installment in the series. Read an overview of the war to date here.

JUNE 15-23, 1918: AUSTRIA-HUNGARY'S LAST GASP

The disaster of Caporetto in 1917 sent Italy’s military prestige plunging to new lows as the Western Entente powers, France and Britain, were forced to rush reinforcements to the Italian Front to shore up their beleaguered ally. But the summer of 1918 offered the Italians a chance at redemption, in the form of a renewed Austrian offensive along the Piave River. The Austrians immediately stumbled due to a reorganized, reinvigorated Italian Army. In fact, the Second Battle of the Piave, lasting from June 15-23, 1918, sounded the death knell of the exhausted, disintegrating feudal empire.

A lot had changed in the six months following the collapse of the Italian armies before the combined Austro-German onslaught at Caporetto, beginning with the replacement of the disgraced chief of the general staff, Luigi Cadorna, by his former aid General Armando Diaz on November 8, 1917. A skilled strategist and energetic administrator, Diaz worked closely with Italy’s British and French allies to establish a new line of defense along the Piave River, then set about reforming the demoralized Italian Army—effectively granting amnesty to tens of thousands of deserters, employing British and French officers as trainers, and reorganizing four unwieldy armies (as well as the remnants of the virtually destroyed Second Army) into nine smaller, more manageable armies, including one in reserve.

On the other side, things had also changed—mostly for the worse. Although Austria-Hungary’s strategic position improved with the Central Powers’ victory over Russia, the empire faced a deepening food crisis, mass strikes by hungry workers, and ever-present ethnic rivalries, now threatening to escalate into full-blown civil war. The military situation was just as desperate: The Habsburg Army was in tatters, never having recovered from itsstunningdefeats in 1914 and 1915, and now found itself deprived of Germany’s help, as the stronger ally withdrew almost all its troops for the final spring offensives on the Western Front. The outlook was so grim that Emperor Karl had secretly explored a separate peace deal with the Allies, but Habsburg peace entreaties were immediately rebuffed (and the offer soon leaked, sowing discord between Austria and Germany).

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Worst of all, German chief strategist Erich Ludendorff expected Austria-Hungary to contribute to his final bid for victory with a new offensive on the Italian Front, intended to tie down Italian, British, and French troops in order to prevent them from reinforcing the beleaguered Allied forces on the Western Front. This request was supported by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was furious about Austria-Hungary’s offer of a separate peace and demanded the new offensive as proof of its loyalty.

But without substantial German help this plan was ambitious to the point of fantasy, prompting Austro-Hungarian Field Marshal Svetozar Borojević, considered one of the most gifted strategists of the First World War, to warn that it would almost certainly lead to defeat and the collapse of the Habsburg Army, probably followed by the empire itself. Instead, he argued for remaining on the defensive, digging in and holding on to northern Italy, at least as a bargaining chip for the inevitable peace negotiations.

However, Borojević was overruled by superiors who found it impossible to defy the Dual Monarchy’s powerful ally. Germany had thrown in its lot with Austria-Hungary at the beginning of the war, and now Austria-Hungary had no choice but to follow Germany to the bitter end.

FATAL PLAN

The original plan proposed by Borojević called for a concentrated attack along the River Piave, allowing Habsburg forces to maximize their scarce artillery and shells. However, Austrian chief of the general staff Arz von Straussenberg and former chief of the general staff Conrad von Hötzendorf, now commanding the armies along the Asiago Plateau, called for simultaneous, widely spaced attacks all along the Italian front, from the Trentino sector all the way to the Adriatic Sea. Borojević appealed to Emperor Karl, arguing that the broad attack would fatally dilute their strength, but was once again overruled (below, an Italian position on the Piave just before the battle).

According to the final plan approved by the general staff, the two main attacks would pit the Habsburg Eleventh Army against the Italian Sixth and Fourth Armies on the Asiago Plateau, scene of Conrad’s failed “Punishment Expedition” in 1916, while the Habsburg “Isonzo Army” (formerly the Fifth Army) attacked the Italian Third Army defending Venice across the River Piave. A third, smaller attack by the Habsburg Tenth Army would tie down the Italian Seventh Army north of Lake Garda.

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Despite all the hurdles facing them, including an arduous river crossing (the Italians had destroyed all the bridges over the Piave), the Habsburg forces achieved surprising success on the first day of the offensive, principally because they retained the element of surprise—and while their artillery was spread out, the use of gas shells helped force the Italians from their frontline trenches in many areas. However, most Italian artillery positions remained undamaged, as evidenced by a furious counter-barrage pounding the Austro-Hungarian attackers.

Jan Tříska, a Czech noncommissioned officer in the Habsburg Army, remembered the opening bombardment at 3 a.m. on June 15, 1918, followed by the counter-bombardment beginning two hours later:

“By 5 a.m., thousands of shells flew over [their] position from both directions—concussion grenades, grenade-shrapnel, shrapnel, mortars, and bombs of all calibers. Light and heavy machine guns and trench mortars from both sides joined the fray. The din was overwhelming. Huddled in their deep shelter, the gunners were stiff with fear. Safely dug in, they still felt exposed and vulnerable in the eye of this storm of steel. This was much worse than anything they had experienced at the Isonzo. They were caught in the middle of one of the greatest battles of the war, and they could do nothing but sit, wait and pray.”

The Italian counter-bombardment terrified young, green Habsburg recruits, according to Tříska, who recorded the unromantic, if entirely understandable, response:

“The veterans among the gunners, terrified, could still manage to maintain their composure; but the 17- and 18-year-old replacements, ‘cannon fodder,’ were a different matter. Nearly all of them had to be physically restrained from jumping from the trench and running. They wept, wet their pants, cried for their mothers, and disintegrated completely. Two boys did manage, somehow, to escape from the trench and made a dash for the road parallel to the river. Some seventy paces behind the trench they were mowed down like weeds by enemy fire.”

Habsburg engineering units next moved forward to build pontoon bridges that allowed around 100,000 attacking infantry to cross the river and overwhelm the Italian frontline trenches, forming temporary bridgeheads across the Piave. The crossing was conducted under heavy enemy artillery fire, which the Habsburg artillery did its best to suppress, albeit with limited success. The prospect of further advances, and perhaps even a breakthrough leading to another Italian rout like Caporetto, didn’t seem so unrealistic now, as Austro-Hungarian artillery units moved forward to keep up the pressure. Tříska remembered that the attackers were amazed by their initial success:

“Exactly as planned, at 5:45 a.m. the sappers began to build two pontoon bridges across the river, which here was about 700 meters wide, up to 3 meters deep, and interspersed with many small islands and gravel bars … 75 minutes later, at 7 a.m., when the bridges were ready and in place (the gunners could not believe their eyes), the Austrian infantry, which in the meantime had moved to the river, began to swarm over the bridges to the Italian side. By then many of the enemy trench mortars and machine guns had been silenced. Once most of the Austrian infantry had made the crossing … the gunners stopped firing at the Italian infantry trenches and started to shell the artillery positions. When the Austrian infantry, after heavy man-to-man fighting, had secured the Italian trenches and had the enemy on the run … the gunners stopped firing—the gun barrels were dangerously hot by then—dismantled the guns, and packed them and the remaining ammunition on the carts that were already waiting with their horses and drivers on the road behind the riverbank … Unbelievably this whole operation, which had started at 3 a.m. this morning, went like clockwork.”

However, the Austro-Hungarian success was short-lived. Following Caporetto the Italians had wisely adopted a strategy of flexible defense, similar to the doctrine of “defense in depth” now generally practiced by both sides on the Western Front. Frontline trenches were usually lightly held, backed up by a whole network of secondary and reserve trenches where the majority of the defending infantry lay in wait, ready to stage a counterattack after the enemy offensive lost its initial momentum. Heavily fortified strongpoints between trenches helped break up and channel the enemy attack to provide denser targets for defenders to the rear (below, Italian marines).

As a result, the Austro-Hungarian troops found it impossible to widen the bridgeheads when approaching strongly held Italian positions on the other side of the Piave River valley. On the second day of the attack the offensive began to fall apart: As Borojević had predicted, Conrad’s offensive from the Asiago Plateau towards Monte Grappa had stalled due to lack of artillery shells, forcing the attackers to retreat. Even worse, unseasonably heavy summer rains caused the Piave to begin rising, washing away pontoon bridges and threatening to cut off the attackers on the far side of the river. British and French planes also bombed the bridgeheads with little opposition, reflecting Allied air superiority on the Italian Front.

A fierce Italian counterattack beginning June 19, using troops transferred from the sector opposite Conrad’s failed sally, left no doubt: The besieged Habsburg bridgeheads, coming under increasingly heavy enemy artillery fire and aerial bombardment, could no longer be held. The whims of Austria-Hungary’s powerful ally settled the question: Ludendorff decided the abortive Austro-Hungarian offensive was no longer important, and instead demanded a quarter million Habsburg troops for immediate redeployment to the Western Front, where his fourth offensive, Gneisenau, had once again failed to achieve a breakthrough. The remainder of the battle was spent withdrawing across the remaining pontoon bridges. By June 23the battle was over (below, an Italian frontline trench).

As always, both sides paid a heavy price in blood for the pointless Second Battle of Piave (which did, however, restore Italian morale and burnish the Italian Army’s credentials in the eyes of Britain and France). Total Habsburg casualties came to 118,000, including dead, wounded, missing, and prisoners, while the Italians suffered 10,000 dead, 35,000 wounded, and 40,000 taken prisoner. More importantly, however, the Italians had withstood the final Central Powers onslaught—and the Habsburg Army was finally approaching its breaking point.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which sanctioned the removal of Japanese immigrants and Americans of Japanese heritage from their homes to be imprisoned in internment camps throughout the country.

At the time, the move was sold to the public as a strategic military necessity. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the government argued that it was impossible to know where the loyalties of Japanese-Americans rested.

Between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were relocated to internment camps along the West Coast and as far east as Louisiana. Here are 12 facts about what former first lady Laura Bush has described as "one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history."

1. The government was already discussing detaining people before the Pearl Harbor attack.

In 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt—who was concerned about Japan’s growing military might—instructed William H. Standley, his chief of naval operations, to clandestinely monitor "every Japanese citizen or non-citizen on the island of Oahu who meets these Japanese ships [arriving in Hawaii] or has any connection with their officers or men" and to secretly place their names "on a special list of those who would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp in the event of trouble."

This sentiment helped lead to the creation of the Custodial Detention List, which would later guide the U.S. in detaining 31,899 Japanese, German, and Italian nationals, separate from the 110,000-plus later interred, without charging them with a crime or offering them any access to legal counsel.

2. Initial studies of the “Japanese problem” proved that there wasn’t one.

In early 1941, Curtis Munson, a special representative of the State Department, was tasked with interviewing West Coast-based Japanese-Americans to gauge their loyalty levels in coordination with the FBI and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Munson reported that there was extraordinary patriotism among Japanese immigrants, saying that "90 percent like our way best," and that they were "extremely good citizen[s]" who were "straining every nerve to show their loyalty." Lieutenant Commander K.D. Ringle’s follow-up report showed the same findings and argued against internment because only a small percentage of the community posed a threat, and most of those individuals were already in custody.

3. The general in charge of Western defense command took nothing happening after Pearl Harbor as proof that something would happen.

Despite both Munson and Ringle debunking the concept of internment as a strategic necessity, the plan moved ahead—spurred largely by Western Defense Command head General John L. DeWitt. One month after Pearl Harbor, DeWitt created the central ground for mass incarceration by declaring: "The fact that nothing has happened so far is more or less ... ominous in that I feel that in view of the fact that we have had no sporadic attempts at sabotage that there is a control being exercised and when we have it, it will be on a mass basis."

DeWitt, whose ancestors were Dutch, didn’t want anyone of Japanese descent on the West Coast, stating that “American citizenship does not necessarily determine loyalty.”

4. Almost no one protested internment.

Alongside General DeWitt, Wartime Civil Control Administration director Colonel Karl Bendetsen avowed that anyone with even “one drop of Japanese blood” should be incarcerated, and the country generally went along with that assessment. Some newspapers ran op-eds opposing the policy, and the American Baptist Home Mission Societies created pamphlets to push back, but as historian Eric Foner wrote in The Story of American Freedom, "One searches the wartime record in vain for public protests among non-Japanese." Senator Robert Taft was the only congressperson to condemn the policy.

5. Supporting or opposing internment were both matters of economics.

White farmers and landowners on the West Coast had great economic incentives to get rid of Japanese farmers who had come to the area only decades before and found success with new irrigation methods. They fomented deep hatred for their Japanese neighbors and publicly advocated for internment, which is one reason so many of the more than 110,000 Japanese individuals sent to camps came from the West Coast. In Hawaii, it was a different story. White business owners opposed internment, but not for noble reasons: They feared losing their workforce. Thus, only between 1200 and 1800 Japanese-Americans from Hawaii were sent to internment camps.

6. People were tagged for identification.

Moving entire communities of people to camps in California, Colorado, Texas, and beyond was a gargantuan logistical task. The military assigned tags with ID numbers to families, including the children, to ensure they would be transferred to the correct camp. In 2012, artist Wendy Maruyama recreated thousands of these tags for an art exhibition she titled "The Tag Project."

"The process of replicating these tags using government databases, writing thousands of names, numbers, and camp locations became a meditative process," Maruyama told Voices of San Diego. “And for the hundreds of volunteers, they could, for a minute or two as they wrote the names, contemplate and wonder what this person was thinking as he or she was being moved from the comforts of home to the spare and bare prisons placed in the foreboding deserts and wastelands of America. And could it happen again?”

7. Not everyone went quietly.

Directly combatting the image of the “polite” Japanese-Americans who acquiesced to internment without protest, collections of resistance stories paint a disruptive picture of those who refused to go to the camps or made trouble once inside. Among those who were considered "problematic" were individuals who refused to register for the compulsory loyalty questionnaire, which asked questions about whether the person was a registered voter and with which party, as well as marital status and "citizenship of wife" and "race of wife."

“A broadly understood notion of resistance represents a more complete picture of what happened during World War II,” David Yoo, a professor of Asian American Studies and History and vice provost at UCLA's Institute of American Cultures, told NBC News about collecting these resistance stories. “Because these stories touch upon human rights, they are important for all peoples.”

8. The government converted unused buildings into camp facilities.

For the most part, camps were set against desert scrub land or infertile Ozark hills bordered with barbed wire. Before getting on buses to be transported to their new "homes," detainees had to go through processing centers housed in converted racetracks and fairgrounds, where they might stay for several months. The largest and most noteworthy center was Santa Anita Park, a racetrack in Arcadia, California, which was shut down so that makeshift barracks could be assembled and horse stables could be used for sleeping quarters.

9. Ansel Adams took hundreds of photographs inside the most famous camp, as did an internee with a smuggled camera.

Approximately 200 miles north of Santa Anita Park, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, was Manzanar—which, with its 11,000 internees, was perhaps the most famous of America's 10 relocation centers. It was also the most photographed facility. In the fall of 1942, famed photographer Ansel Adams—who was personally outraged by the situation when a family friend was taken from his home and moved halfway across the country—shot more than 200 images of the camp. In a letter to a friend about a book being made of the photos, Adams wrote that, "Through the pictures the reader will be introduced to perhaps 20 individuals ... loyal American citizens who are anxious to get back into the stream of life and contribute to our victory."

While Adams may have successfully offered a small glimpse at life inside Manzanar, Tōyō Miyatake—a photographer and detainee who managed to smuggle a lens and film into the camp, which he later fashioned into a makeshift camera—produced a series of photos that offered a much more intimate depiction of what everyday life was like for the individuals who were imprisoned there between 1942 and 1945. Today, Manzanar is a National Historic Site.

10. Detainees were told they were in camps for their own protection.

Just as the justification for internment was an erroneous belief in mass disloyalty among a single racial group, the argument given to those incarcerated was that they were better off inside the barbed wire compounds than back in their own homes, where racist neighbors could assault them. When presented with that logic, one detainee rebutted, “If we were put there for our protection, why were the guns at the guard towers pointed inward, instead of outward?”

11. Internees experienced long-term health problems because of the camps, and children had it the worst.

Internment officially lasted through 1944, with the last camp closing in early 1946. In those years, Japanese-Americans did their best to make lives for themselves on the inside. That included jobs and governance, as well as concerts, religion, and sports teams. Children went to school, but there were also dances and comic books to keep them occupied. But the effects of their internment were long-lasting.

There have been multiple studies of the physical and psychological health of former internees. They found those placed in camps had a greater risk for cardiovascular disease and death, as well as traumatic stress. Younger internees experienced low self-esteem, as well as psychological trauma that led many to shed their Japanese culture and language. Gwendolyn M. Jensen’s The Experience of Injustice: Health Consequences of the Japanese American Internment found that younger internees “reported more post-traumatic stress symptoms of unexpected and disturbing flashback experiences than those who were older at the time of incarceration.”

12. A congressional panel called it a “grave injustice" ... 40 years later.

It wasn’t until 1983 that a special Congressional commission determined that the mass internment was a matter of racism and not of military strategy. Calling the incarceration a “grave injustice,” the panel cited the ignored Munson and Ringle reports, the absence of any documented acts of espionage, and delays in shutting down the camps due to weak political leadership from President Roosevelt on down as factors in its conclusion. The commission paved the way for President Reagan to sign the Civil Liberties Act, which gave each surviving internee $20,000 and officially apologized. Approximately two-thirds of the more than 110,000 people detained were U.S. citizens.

The Disturbing Reason Schools Tattooed Their Students in the 1950s

When Paul Bailey was born at Beaver County Hospital in Milford, Utah on May 9, 1955, it took less than two hours for the staff to give him a tattoo. Located on his torso under his left arm, the tiny marking was rendered in indelible ink with a needle gun and indicated Bailey’s blood type: O-Positive.

“It is believed to be the youngest baby ever to have his blood type tattooed on his chest,” reported the Beaver County News, cooly referring to the infant as an “it.” A hospital employee was quick to note parental consent had been obtained first.

The permanent tattooing of a child who was only hours old was not met with any hysteria. Just the opposite: In parts of Utah and Indiana, local health officials had long been hard at work instituting a program that would facilitate potentially life-saving blood transfusions in the event of a nuclear attack. By branding children and adults alike with their blood type, donors could be immediately identified and used as “walking blood banks” for the critically injured.

Taken out of context, it seems unimaginable. But in the 1950s, when the Cold War was at its apex and atomic warfare appeared not only possible but likely, children willingly lined up at schools to perform their civic duty. They raised their arm, gritted their teeth, and held still while the tattoo needle began piercing their flesh.

The practice of subjecting children to tattoos for blood-typing has appropriately morbid roots. Testifying at the Nuremberg Tribunal on War Crimes in the 1940s, American Medical Association physician Andrew Ivy observed that members of the Nazi Waffen-SS carried body markings indicating their blood type [PDF]. When he returned to his hometown of Chicago, Ivy carried with him a solution for quickly identifying blood donors—a growing concern due to the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. The conflict was depleting blood banks of inventory, and it was clear that reserves would be necessary.

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If the Soviet Union targeted areas of the United States for destruction, it would be vital to have a protocol for blood transfusions to treat radiation poisoning. Matches would need to be found quickly. (Transfusions depend on matching blood to avoid the adverse reactions that come from mixing different types. When a person receives blood different from their own, the body will create antibodies to destroy the red blood cells.)

In 1950, the Department of Defense placed the American Red Cross in charge of blood donor banks for the armed forces. In 1952, the Red Cross was the coordinating agency [PDF] for obtaining blood from civilians for the National Blood Program, which was meant to replenish donor supply during wartime. Those were both measures for soldiers. Meanwhile, local medical societies were left to determine how best to prepare their civilian communities for a nuclear event and its aftermath.

As part of the Chicago Medical Civil Defense Committee, Ivy promoted the use of the tattoos, declaring them as painless as a vaccination. Residents would get blood-typed by having their finger pricked and a tiny droplet smeared on a card. From there, they would be tattooed with the ABO blood group and Rhesus factor (or Rh factor), which denotes whether or not a person has a certain type of blood protein present.

The Chicago Medical Society and the Board of Health endorsed the program and citizens voiced a measure of support for it. One letter to the editor of The Plainfield Courier-News in New Jersey speculated it might even be a good idea to tattoo Social Security numbers on people's bodies to make identification easier.

Despite such marked enthusiasm, the project never entered into a pilot testing stage in Chicago.

Officials with the Lake County Medical Society in nearby Lake County, Indiana were more receptive to the idea. In the spring of 1951, 5000 residents were blood-typed using the card method. But, officials cautioned, the cards could be lost in the chaos of war or even the relative quiet of everyday life. Tattoos and dog tags were encouraged instead. When 1000 people lined up for blood-typing at a county fair, two-thirds agreed to be tattooed as part of what the county had dubbed "Operation Tat-Type." By December 1951, 15,000 Lake County residents had been blood-typed. Roughly 60 percent opted for a permanent marking.

The program was so well-received that the Lake County Medical Society quickly moved toward making children into mobile blood bags. In January 1952, five elementary schools in Hobart, Indiana enrolled in the pilot testing stage. Children were sent home with permission slips explaining the effort. If parents consented, students would line up on appointed tattoo days to get their blood typed with a finger prick. From there, they’d file into a room—often the school library—set up with makeshift curtains behind which they could hear a curious buzzing noise.

When a child stepped inside, they were greeted by a school administrator armed with indelible ink and wielding a Burgess Vibrotool, a medical tattoo gun featuring 30 to 50 needles. The child would raise their left arm to expose their torso (since arms and legs might be blown off in an attack) and were told the process would only take seconds.

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Some children were stoic. Some cried before, during, or after. One 11-year-old recounting her experience with the program said a classmate emerged from the session and promptly fainted. All were left with a tattoo less than an inch in diameter on their left side, intentionally pale so it would be as unobtrusive as possible.

At the same time that grade schoolers—and subsequently high school students—were being imprinted in Indiana, kids in Cache and Rich counties in Utah were also submitting to the program, despite potential religious obstacles for the region's substantial Mormon population. In fact, Bruce McConkie, a representative of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, declared that blood-type tattoos were exempt from the typical prohibitions on Mormons defacing their bodies, giving the program a boost among the devout. The experiment would not last much longer, though.

By 1955, 60,000 adults and children had gotten tattooed with their blood types in Lake County. In Milford, health officials persisted in promoting the program widely, offering the tattoos for free during routine vaccination appointments. But despite the cooperation exhibited by communities in Indiana and Utah, the programs never spread beyond their borders.

The Korean conflict had come to an end in 1953, reducing the strain put on blood supplies and along with it, the need for citizens to double as walking blood banks. More importantly, outside of the program's avid boosters, most physicians were extremely reticent to rely solely on a tattoo for blood-typing. They preferred to do their own testing to make certain a donor was a match with a patient.

There were other logistical challenges that made the program less than useful. The climate of a post-nuclear landscape meant that bodies might be charred, burning off tattoos and rendering the entire operation largely pointless. With the Soviet Union’s growing nuclear arsenal—1600 warheads were ready to take to the skies by 1960—the idea of civic defense became outmoded. Ducking and covering under desks, which might have shielded some from the immediate effects of a nuclear blast, would be meaningless in the face of such mass destruction.

Programs like tat-typing eventually fell out of favor, yet tens of thousands of adults consented to participate even after the flaws in the program were publicized, and a portion allowed their young children to be marked, too. Their motivation? According to Carol Fischler, who spoke with the podcast 99% Invisible about being tattooed as a young girl in Indiana, the paranoia over the Cold War in the 1950s drowned out any thought of the practice being outrageous or harmful. Kids wanted to do their part. Many nervously bit their lip but still lined up with the attitude that the tattoo was part of being a proud American.

Perhaps equally important, children who complained of the tattoo leaving them particularly sore received another benefit: They got the rest of the afternoon off.